almost exclusively handled felony appeals.That was the primary lure for Sevilla.

“I love doing appeals,” he says. “Inthe trial arena, everything comes atyou incredibly fast and it’s an incrediblystressful experience. I compare it to a manwith a butterfly net. The issues are comingat you, and you catch some and missothers. The appeal is an opportunity tostrategically think through your position inthe briefing. I like the deliberative processand the opportunity to write my position.”But he never cared for the bureaucracyof state government, and, in 1983, afterGov. George Deukmejian cut the office’sbudget in half, he left. Enter his old boss,Cleary, with whom he had stayed in touch.The two started their own firm afteragreeing on two rules. “We would neverhave any associates, and we would practiceour own law,” Sevilla says.

Their type of law was groundbreaking.
Two years after going into private practice,
Sevilla established the current standard
for the insanity defense. People v. Skinner
involved a schizophrenic who thought God
permitted him to kill his wife because of
the “till death do us part” clause of the
marital vow. Sevilla successfully petitioned
to reverse a variant of the ancient “wild
beast test” for insanity. Previously, the
defendant had to show he or she did not
understand the nature and quality of the
act and did not understand right from
wrong. Skinner established that it could be
either, not that it had to be both.

Several years later, Sevilla handledthe much-publicized appeal of formerMayor Roger Hedgecock, who had beenconvicted of 12 perjury counts and onecount of conspiracy for violating thefair political practices act. “His trial wasthe last sequestered jury in San DiegoCounty, and this case made sure therewould never be another,” Sevilla says.“The juries were partying, drinking andtalking to the bailiff about the case. Thejustice said they gave new meaning to‘hung jury’ because one of the jurors washung over during the verdict.”Sevilla filed a 250-page brief in theappeals court. In 1991, the dozen perjurycounts were thrown out at the stateSupreme Court, and Hedgecock accepted aconviction of a single misdemeanor count inexchange for no jail sentence and no retrial.

Headline-making cases are not alwayssuccesses, of course. “Most of Chuck’sbattles are really uphill ones,” Cleary says.

Sevilla turns morose when he thinks
of the uphill battles he’s lost. He talks at
length about a recent client who killed
his cousin with a knife. “[ The cousin] was
like a sister to him, but he got paranoid
and thought she represented the forces
of darkness.” The client was convicted
and sentenced to 29 years to life. Sevilla
thought he made a compelling case before
the Supreme Court—that in the original
trial, the attorney made a mistake in not
pursing an insanity plea.

“The Supreme Court suggested intheir opinion that the original attorneydid a great job because his client wasn’tsentenced to death or life without thepossibility of parole,” Sevilla says. “But henever faced those sentences! It surprisedme the Supreme Court made an error ofthat magnitude without correcting it. Butit’s as one justice said: ‘We are final notbecause we’re perfect, but because we’rethe last court in town.’”One of his most emotionally difficultcases was the death sentence appeal ofconvicted murderer Robert Alton Harrisin 1992.

“Chuck took personal calls from Harrisand helped with the guy’s morale,”Cleary says. “When he was fighting theexecution up to the last second, Chuckwas right up in the institution in theinterview room.”It was Sevilla’s uneasy task to monitorhis client through the night to determine ifhe would suffer a mental collapse—whichwould mean he could not be executed, sincecondemned prisoners must be legally saneat the moment they are strapped into thechair to receive cyanide so they understandthe punishment.

Sevilla had negotiated unmonitoredphone access to Harris’ cell behind thegas chamber to keep him informed of theattempts to stay the execution. During theevening, as Harris ate his last meal, stayswere issued by lower courts, and thenoverturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.Cleary recalls talking to Harris at 4:08a.m., finding him “hyper-excited, hungryfor details of what had happened.”At 5:48 a.m., on April 21, the U.S.Supreme Court vacated the last stay andSevilla said goodbye to Harris, who wasescorted to the gas chamber. Sevilla satnumbly for the next hour staring out thewindow as witnesses to the executionfiltered out of San Quentin. It was thestate’s first execution in a quarter-century.

AS A WAY TO VENT THE FRUSTRATIONS

of his work, Sevilla has written two satiricnovels about a lawyer, John Wilkes,named for a 17th-century, English, radicaljournalist and politician who spent muchof his life alternately being jailed andelected to public office. Sevilla situatedWilkes’ adventures in New York so noone would think the characters weremodeled on actual San Diego attorneys.Consequently, many New York lawyerswrote to him, asking if the characters werebased on their friends. “I told them all thisspeaks to is the transcendental quality ofthe courtroom,” Sevilla says. “Whether inNew York or San Diego, the experiencesare the same.”No one would ever mistake Wilkes forSevilla, however. “He curses, bamboozles,wheedles, whines, and wins any way hecan,” Sevilla writes of Wilkes in one of thenovels. “He never met a judge he couldrespect.”In contrast, when Sevilla talks about hisclients, there is an unmistakable fondness.“[Mayor Hedgecock] may have made errorsof judgments, but that balances againstall the good he did,” says Sevilla. Theschizophrenic who stabbed his cousin todeath was, Sevilla says, “a nice young manwho is stable and makes sense when he isunder heavy psychotropic.

“In the work I do, you need to have
compassion for your fellow man,” Sevilla
adds. “Yes, they might have done wrong
or made colossal misjudgments. Although
they are being judged by the court system
for the worst thing they did in their life, I
look at their life span. I don’t judge them by
the worst thing they did, but by the whole
fabric of the threads of their life.”